Mary McAlpin

Mary McAlpin’s major field is 18th-century French literature and culture. Her research interests are the Enlightenment, the French Revolution, the history of medicine, and gender theory.

Publications

Monographs

• Female Sexuality and Cultural Degradation in Enlightenment France: Medicine and Literature (Farnham, Surrey, UK and Burlington, VT: Ashgate Press, 2012), 220 pp.
• Gender, Authenticity, and the Missive Letter in Eighteenth-Century France: Marie-Anne de La Tour and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2006), 250 pp.

Edited Volumes

• Homage to Gita May, eds. Mary McAlpin and Alexander Wettlaufer, Romanic Review, special issue, forthcoming 107.1-4 (January-November 2016)
• Academic editor, “Marie-Jeanne Roland,” Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, vol. 258 (Detroit, MI: Gale, Cengage Learning, 2017), 1-104

Articles

• “Théophile de Bordeu and the Masturbating Girl,” special issue of the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies, “The Sexes and the Sciences,” forthcoming 2019
• “Rape in Paradise: Naturalizing Sexual Violence in Diderot’s Tahitian Reverie,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 50.3 (April 2017): 289-302
• “The Rape of Roxane and the End of the World in the Lettres persanes,” Romanic Review, 107.1-4 (January-November 2016): 55-74
• Review essay, Sabine Arnaud, On Hysteria: The Invention of a Medical Category between 1670 and 1820 (Chicago, 2015), H-France Forum 11.6 [http://h-france.net/forum/h-franceforumvol11.html], 2016
• “Health and the Eighteenth-Century French Woman: A History of Decline,” in Women, Gender and Disease in Eighteenth-Century England and France (Cambridge: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2014): 45-65.
• “‘Accablé de tant de vêtements’: Climat et désir dans les Lettres persanes,” in Les Lettres persanes en leur temps, ed. Philip Stewart (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2013), 69-93
• “The Virtues of Childhood Sexual Abuse and Marital Infidelity in Marie-Jeanne Roland’s Private Memoirs (1795),” Journal of the History of Sexuality 21.1 (January 2012): 16-38; reprinted in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, vol. 258 (Detroit, MI: Gale, Cengage Learning, 2017), 90-103
• “Innocence of Experience: Rousseau on Puberty in the State of Civilization,” Journal of the History of Ideas 71.2 (April 2010): 241-261
• “The Rape of Cécile and the Triumph of Love in the Liaisons dangereuses,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 43.1 (2009): 1-19
• “Julie’s Breasts, Julie’s Scars: Physiology and Character in La Nouvelle Héloïse,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 36 (March 2007): 1-20; reprinted in Literature Criticism from 1400 to 1800, vol. 198 (Detroit, MI: Gale, Cengage Learning, 2012):174-308
• “Utopia in the Seraglio: Feminist Hermeneutics and Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes,” in Gender and Utopia in the Eighteenth Century, eds. Nicole Pohl and Brenda Tooley (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate Press, 2007): 87-106
• “Gender and Sex in the Enlightenment,” Encyclopedia of Sex and Gender, vol. 2, Ed. Fedwa Malti-Douglas (Detroit: Macmillan Reference USA, 2007), 463-4
• “Goethe’s Number-One Fan: A Neo-Feminist Reading of Bettina Brentano-von Arnim, with Balzac and Kundera,” Comparative Literature: Journal of the American Comparative Literature Association 57.4 (Fall 2005): 294-311
• “Religion in Diderot’s La Religieuse,” XVIII New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century 2.1 (Spring 2005): 3-15
• “Julien Offroy de La Mettrie,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, “The French Enlightenment, I,” Ed. Samia I. Spencer (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 2005), 313: 293-297
• “Marie-Charlotte-Pauline Robert de Lézardière,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, “The French Enlightenment, I,” Ed. Samia I. Spencer (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 2005), 313: 317-321
• “Louis Sébastien Mercier,” Dictionary of Literary Biography, “The French Enlightenment, II,” Ed. Samia I. Spencer (Detroit: Bruccoli Clark Layman, 2005), 314: 39-46
• “Historical Autobiography: The Mémoires de Mme Roland,” Romance Quarterly 47.1 (Winter 2000): 3-17
• “Between Men for All Eternity: Feminocentrism in the Lettres persanes,” Eighteenth-Century Life 24.1 (Winter 2000): 45-61
• “Poststructuralist Feminism and the Imaginary Woman Writer: The Lettres portugaises,” Romanic Review 90.1 (January 2000): 27-44
• “Adélaïde-Gillette Billet Dufrénoy,” Feminist Encyclopedia of French Literature, Ed. Eva Martin Sartori (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999): 165
• “Anne Pauline Léon,” Feminist Encyclopedia of French Literature, Ed. Eva Martin Sartori (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999): 315-6
• “Jeanne-Antoinette Poisson de Pompadour,” Feminist Encyclopedia of French Literature, Ed. Eva Martin Sartori (Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1999): 423-4
• “Alexandre Dumas (père),” Encyclopedia of the Novel, Ed. Paul E. Schellinger (Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers, 1998): 208-9
• “Julie Responds to St. Preux: Marie-Anne de La Tour’s Letters to Rousseau,” Women in French Studies 5 (1997): 135-148

Email: mmcalpin@utk.edu

Education

Ph.D., Columbia University